IT Jobs Watch • Tracking the IT job market

About IT Jobs Watch

IT Jobs Watch provides a unique perspective on today's information technology labour market. Our aim is to present a concise and accurate map of the prevailing UK IT job market conditions.

Our service offers national, regional and local labour market statistics and is useful for:

Salary benchmarking

Discovering IT skill sets

Job role & IT skill trends

Job role skills requirements

Finding the best IT job vacancies

Our Methodology

We research and publish open IT job market insights based on continuous and rigorous analysis of job vacancy postings.

Since 2004, this website has published real-time job vacancy statistics, technology skill set trends and salary/contractor rate benchmarking information.

Contractor rates are calculated directly from the figures quoted. We do not derive average hourly rates from daily rates quoted or vice versa.

Website Navigation

The homepage provides tabular summary statistics and by default lists permanent IT jobs ordered by Rank. The aggregates cover the 6 or 3 month period to
the day shown in the page footer. The statistics are updated daily.

You can enter comma-separated IT skill and/or job role search terms. You can also filter by selecting a category and a location such as South East or London.
Columns can be sorted ascending and descending by clicking the column headings.

Each row in the summary table links to Detailed Analysis and Historical Trends dating back to 2004.

Rank: refers to the relative position of a job role or skill in terms of the number of matching unique IT job vacancies seen over a 6 or 3 month period.
Rank is a simple measure of popularity with 1 indicating the most popular. The Rank is calculated nationwide and per region, area and town/city.

Rank Change: is the difference in Rank over the previous 6 or 3 month period and the Rank for the same 6 or 3 month period last year.
A positive Rank Change indicates a relative increase in demand. The value of Rank Change provides a basic indication of the relative change in demand
across the entire IT job market.

Average Salary Calculations

The average salaries offer a guide and are calculated directly from the figures quoted in job ads. Benefits in kind, bonuses, etc., are not included in the calculations.

Average salaries (and average contractor rates) are based on the median or 50th percentile.

Most salary distributions tend to be positively skewed, with a larger number of lower salaries and a small number of high salaries. Very high or low salaries compared
to the rest of the market are called outliers. Average salaries based on the arithmetic mean
are adversely affected by these outliers. Outliers that are high tend to drive the mean upward. Similarly, very low outliers tend to drive the mean downward.

The median is not affected by outliers and as such provides a more representative market average for salaries.

To provide perspective on the scope and distribution of salaries, the salary trend charts include two standard ranges around the median:

1. The 25th to 75th percentile range (or interquartile range) represents the middle 50% of salaries closest to the median. The interquartile range excludes the lowest 25% and highest 25% of salaries.

2. The 10th to 90th percentile range (or interdecile range) represents 80% of salaries closest to the median. The interdecile range excludes the lowest 10% and highest 10% of salaries.

Check our June 2017 methodology update. In recognition of a significant trend, we have updated the methodology we employ to calculate percentiles in order to enhance the accuracy of our salary distribution statistics.